Rwanda: obscuring the truth about the genocide

Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission
of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It
found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians - including former
president François Mitterand - complicit in the genocide.

Considering that the current Rwandan leadership has vilified France ever
since it launched its bid to seize power in Rwanda in October 1990,
eventually winning power in July 1994, it is not surprising that it should
now up the stakes against its long-time enemy. The new strongman of Rwanda,
President Paul Kagame, is fortunate that he has unswerving support from the
United States, Britain and Belgium, and a cheerleading media in these
countries which can be counted upon to give his report into France's role in
the genocide maximum impact.

But the truth is that France's major mistake was to find itself on the wrong
side of the moral parable that has been imposed by Western observers on
Rwanda's recent tragic history. A war that was complicated by considerable
international intervention has become over-simplified into a morality tale
of good versus evil, in which France has been branded as part of the `evil
side'. Such a simplification further obscures the truth about what happened
in Rwanda in 1994, and whitewashes the role of Western intervention more
broadly.

According to the moral parable of Rwanda, the good guys were the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 because it had no other
means of protecting the persecuted minority of ethnic Tutsis inside Rwanda
and of making the then Hutu-led government accept the right of return of
Rwandan Tutsis living abroad as refugees. The bad guys were in the Rwandan
government and armed forces. When the international community had helped
Rwandans achieve a negotiated settlement, the worst elements among the bad
guys drew up a plan to secure Hutu domination once and for all by planning
and then implementing genocide against Rwandan Tutsis.

By the time the good guys - the RPF - had fought them off, their evil
mission had been largely completed. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis
were dead. Genocide had occurred, and the Western world had simply looked on
passively. The United States refused to label the war that took place as a
genocide in order to resist the clamour for international intervention to
save lives. France was the only force on the United Nations Security Council
to respond by sending in French forces under Operation Turquoise. But
France's real motivation was not to save lives, but to shore up its
erstwhile allies: the bad guys. The French helped them escape Rwanda so that
they would not have to answer for their crimes.

A moral analysis like this is compelling because it provides a clear pathway
through a maze of complicating factors. For journalists, this moral
signposting of the Rwandan genocide leads the way to great copy about the
bravery of the heroes and the moral turpitude of the villains. For
governments, it provides the crucial element of legitimacy that is the
essential underpinning of their right to rule. The Rwandan regime under Paul
Kagame depends on this version of events for its support and survival. And
so do its principal sponsors, the United States and Great Britain.

As the force that relieved Rwanda from genocide, the RPF - whose leadership
currently runs Rwanda - has exploited this version of events to remind
Western governments that they failed to live up to the `Never Again'
principle that was the driving force behind the passing of the Genocide
Convention at the United Nations in 1948. While they battled the
genocidaires in 1994, the Western world simply looked on. Except France,
that is. But as a supporter of the former, pre-RPF regime, France's motives
for intervening were highly questionable.

It may be the most widely told story of Rwanda, but this version of events
is deeply flawed. While the US may have been embarrassed by this account,
appearing less than heroic during the months of Rwanda's greatest torment,
it is far easier for it to live with this embarrassment than to be
confronted with the facts of how it did intervene in this region of Africa
in the early 1990s and since Kagame came to power.

The `plane crash' debate
====================================

In fact, the three most influential Western players in Rwanda at this time -
the US, France and Belgium - all intervened in ways that created the
conditions that made mass slaughter inevitable. Contrary to the prevailing
version of events, after its initial deployment of troops defending Rwandan
leaders against the RPF's October War in 1990, by means of Operation Noroît,
France recognised that the US and Uganda were behind the RPF and had no
desire to become isolated as the sole defender of the Rwandan government. So
it increasingly made its military support conditional upon the government's
commitment to serious negotiations with the RPF. According to an informant
from the French Ministry of Cooperation, France's decision to disengage was
already evident in 1990: `We did not want to remain alone…there were great
powers behind the RPF. Uganda could send 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers.' (1)

The Kagame government's latest salvo against France, in the shape of its
commission report fingering the French for their support for the genocide,
is in fact part of an increasingly desperate search for political
legitimacy. The weakest point of the Rwandan moral parable is the question
of what caused the re-eruption of the war in 1994 and the subsequent descent
into mass slaughter. The start of the bloodiest stage of the war is far more
complicated than the moral storytellers - who blame it on the then evil
government's determination to secure Hutu domination - would have us
believe.

It was an act of international terrorism that triggered the return to war.
In early April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Hutu President Juvénal
Habyarimana was blown out of the sky by a missile attack that had been
planned for several months. Apologists for the RPF have tried hard to blame
the attack upon hardline Hutu conspirators, but they have produced nothing
of substance to back up this claim. Rather, there is an accumulating amount
of evidence that the RPF was responsible for the missile attack - and it is
this evidence that has put the current RPF government, led by Kagame, on the
back foot. It is the government's defensiveness on this issue that lies at
the heart of the current France-bashing.

The UN's own investigator, Michael Hourigan, first came across compelling
evidence of the RPF's responsibility for assassinating President Habyarimana
and the other unfortunate occupants of his plane. However, it appears that
under pressure from Washington, the UN agreed to shut down its investigation
into the missile attack. Another UN investigator, Robert Gersony, came
across evidence of RPF atrocities and was also silenced; the UN even stated
that his report `did not exist'.

These inconvenient truths threatened to muddy the clear waters of moral
certainty that the Rwandan parable provides. The Rwandan regime has lived
behind the shield of international powers which have worked hard to keep the
matter of the plane shooting off the agenda. For all of its 13 years of
operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), whose
brief is to establish the truth of what happened in 1994, has ruled that the
matter of the President Habyarimana's assassination (which it chooses to
refer to simply as a plane `crash') is not within its remit. When one of the
ICTR's chief prosecutors, Carla Del Ponte, expressed her desire to dust off
the investigation into the allegations against the RPF, stating that `if it
is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of genocide must be
rewritten' (2), she was abruptly relieved of her position and moved to The
Hague.

Del Ponte's successor at the ICTR, the Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow,
subsequently confirmed that the shooting down of the aircraft is `not a case
that falls within our jurisdiction' (3). It is ironic that the ICTR's first
chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, has expressed his view that the plane
attack does fall within the remit of the court and ought to be investigated.
`It is clearly related to the genocide, by all accounts [it was] the trigger
that started the genocide and it would have been very, very important from a
justice point of view, from victims' point of view, to find out.' (4)

However, the ICTR's deputy prosecutor, Bernard Muna, felt cavalier enough
about the issue to tell the ICTR's legal adviser, Kingsley Moghalu, that
`after all, there was a state of war, and Habyarimana could be considered a
legitimate target' (5). This is an extraordinary statement from such a
senior figure. The missile attack was, among other things, a deliberate
violation of Article 1 of the Arusha Accords of 4 August 1993, which stated:
`The war between the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front is
over.'

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the UN at the time of the
Rwanda tragedy, is also emphatic about the cover-up of the investigation
into the plane shooting: `It is a very mysterious scandal. Four reports have
been made on Rwanda: the French Parliament Report, the Belgian Senate
Report, Kofi Annan's UN report, and the Organization of African Unity
report. All four say absolutely nothing about the shooting down of the
Rwandan president's plane. That just goes to show the power of the
intelligence services that can force people to be quiet.' (6)

Building upon the evidence received by the UN investigator Michael Hourigan,
the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière conducted his own enquiry on behalf of
the family of the French pilot who died in the missile attack, along with
the presidents of both Rwandan and Burundi and senior government and
military figures. Bruguière's report is thoroughgoing and detailed. I have
interviewed one of the several RPF dissidents who briefed the judge: Aloys
Ruyenzi. A former member of Kagame's guard, Ruyenzi states categorically
that he was in the room when Kagame gave the order to shoot down the
president's plane, and names all those who were present. The meeting was
between 2pm and 3pm on 31 March 1994 (7). The Kagame government reacted in
its customary fashion to these revelations about the shooting down of the
plane: it launched a character assassination of all the Rwandan contributors
to Bruguière's report, and condemned Bruguière for being, well, French.

Western complicity: what about the US?
======================================

Yet there is more than the legitimacy of the Rwandan government at stake in
this latest retelling of the moral parable on Rwanda. The RPF would not have
sustained its war without diplomatic support from Washington. The US
intervened to legitimise the RPF's war, even though the justifications for
it had by that time proven to be baseless. The first invasion in 1990 was
timed, not to force a reluctant Rwandan government to allow refugees to
return, but to disrupt arrangements already in place to accommodate
returning refugees.

Rather than being a desertion from the Ugandan military (the RPF leadership
were in top positions in the Ugandan state), the invasion of Rwanda in 1990
was a joint Ugandan-RPF venture. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was
keen to have an ally in power south of the border. More importantly, he
wanted to be rid of his Rwandan refugee `problem'. The issues of land
occupation by Rwandans, and suspicions about the leverage that Rwandans in
top official positions enjoyed in the Ugandan government, had generated
Museveni's first political crisis since he took power in 1986.

Behind Uganda was its closest international ally and sponsor, Washington. It
was US intervention, in the person of secretary of state for African affairs
Herman Cohen, which chose not to condemn the RPF's invasion and Uganda's
support for it, but rather to support the military recovery of the RPF upon
its initial defeat. Cohen coerced President Habyarimana not only to
negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but to enter negotiations with it in
order that a stake for the RPF in a new government be agreed.

By July 1992, Rwanda no longer had a single-party regime but a coalition
government and a new democratic constitution. The constitution guaranteed
freedom of political organisation and prohibited discrimination on any
grounds, ethnic or otherwise.

Of course, it takes more than a constitution to bring about democracy, but
it was a promising start and presented another opportunity for the US to
tell its Ugandan ally Museveni to pull the plug on the RPF or face the end
of the privileged `New African Leader' status that it had bestowed upon him.
There was nothing to prevent the RPF from campaigning for support inside
Rwanda alongside the other opposition parties. Nothing except the fact that
the RPF was feared and loathed by the majority of Rwanda's population. And
yet, Washington was happy for the RPF to intensify its war. In February
1993, the RPF violated the Arusha `peace process' with its heaviest
offensive to date. It is arguably the case that if there had not been French
forces around the capital Kigali, the RPF may have succeeded in seizing
power at that time. The offensive resulted in thousands of deaths and the
displacement of nearly a million people, living in miserable conditions in
makeshift camps. This offensive did more than anything else to generate
hatred for the RPF and, tragically, for the local Tutsi population who were
assumed to be in league with the overwhelmingly Tutsi RPF.

How human rights lobbyists boosted the RPF
==========================================

The RPF had violated the negotiations process with another round of death
and destruction. But thanks to coordinated human rights lobbying, the RPF
returned to the negotiating table unapologetic about its own conduct and
full of moral indignation at the evils of the Rwandan government. A
suspiciously well-timed human rights report was published in 1993, accusing
the Rwandan government of gross violations of human rights. Some of its
authors even accused it of genocide. The government had been responsible for
atrocities against civilians in response to the RPF's initial invasion, and
had admitted to them. It objected to the report's bias: the investigators
had made only a token effort to investigate allegations of atrocities
committed by the RPF, spending only a few hours interviewing people in the
presence of RPF soldiers.

Thanks in large measure to the impact of this report, the RPF was able to
take the moral high ground and use the negotiations as a vehicle for
translating its military gains into political gains. RPF intransigence and
military strategy was facilitated in no small measure by the human rights
crusade that was launched against the Habyarimana-led coalition government.

But France, too, played a vital role in prodding the Rwandan government to
reach a political settlement with the RPF. According to the French writer
Agnes Callamard, it was not just pressure from the US that was applied to
get Habyarimana to sign the Arusha Accords in 1993 - `it is doubtful if
Habyarimana would have signed the peace accords, which gave heavy
concessions to the RPF, without pressure and guarantees from the Elysée
through François Mitterand's personal emissaries, and possibly from
representatives of the Military Mission of Cooperation, specifically Général
Huchon, Colonel Cussac - the French military attaché and head of the French
military Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel
Maurin.' (8)

Having secured a virtual coup in the 1993 negotiations - the RPF had won 50
per cent command of the envisaged unified army and enough seats in the
proposed transitional government to block anything that was against its
interests - the RPF had emerged as the strongest party. The problem it now
faced was the scheduled elections where its unpopularity would have been
exposed. Local elections in the demilitarised zone that was created in the
wake of the February 1993 offensive pointed the way - the RPF was massively
defeated at the hands of the former ruling party.

Faced with the prospect of being downsized to a small party by the Rwandan
electorate, and with clear support from the US and Belgium, it would appear
that the RPF's interests could only be further advanced with a return to the
battlefield. With the promised departure of French forces from Kigali in
December 1993, the military path to the capital was clear. What was needed
by the RPF was a justification for resuming the war.

The Rwandan war re-erupts
=========================

The assassination of President Habyarimana by means of the missile attack
upon his plane set off a round of killings of opposition political figures
by elements of Habyarimana's Presidential Guard on one hand, and killings of
members of the former ruling party by the RPF on the other. Massacres of
Tutsi civilians by Hutu militia soon followed in Kigali, and then spread
across the country. But, contrary to the conventional story, RPF forces were
on the march long before any massacres occurred.

Peter Erlinder, the lead defence council for the ICTR, stated categorically
in a letter to the Canadian prime minister in 2006 that the final offensive
of the RPF was ordered by Kagame within minutes of learning of the
successful missile attack, `long before any retaliatory, civilian killings
had occurred anywhere in Rwanda' (9).

Three years of mounting fear, insecurity and material deprivation (much of
Rwanda was by this time in the grip of famine) came to a head. Rwanda's
hastily (but constitutionally) appointed government of surviving ministers
fled the capital. The army was pinned down in one losing encounter with the
RPF after another. In these anarchic conditions, Rwanda's defenceless Tutsi
population bore the brunt of murderous hatred generated by an ethnically
polarising war.

The RPF won the war and took power in July 1994. Africa then witnessed the
largest mass exodus in its history. Over two million Rwandans voted with
their feet and moved to former Zaïre and Tanzania. The United States,
Britain and Belgium in particular rushed to recognise the new regime in
Kigali.

Even greater numbers were still to die. The new Rwandan regime's invasion of
various refugee camps and its forced repatriation of refugees, the massacre
of internally displaced people in Kibeho in April 1995, and two invasions of
what became the Democratic Republic of Congo by the ruling RPF - all of this
has brought the death toll of civilians to a level that is the highest of
any conflict since the Second World War. The number of ministers leaving the
new government and later dying in mysterious circumstances continues to
rise. Accountability on the part of the Rwandan regime for these violations
is waived by its sponsors in Washington, London and Brussels. Whenever
challenged on these matters, officials from these capitals will reply that
this was the force that liberated Rwanda from genocide, and continued
Western backing for it is necessary to ensure that the genocidaires never
return to power.

The truth behind the moral parable
==================================

But facts are stubborn things. Bruguière's charges will not go away. The
matter of the assassination of two heads of state is the Achilles heel of
the Rwandan government. If the RPF's responsibility for the plane shooting
as a planned move towards reigniting the war in Rwanda is proven, what can
be said about the diplomatic protection given to the RPF by the US and other
Western powers? How can the leader of the `war against terror' - America -
explain its suppression of the facts about the assassination of two heads of
state? What do we make of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's
brief to foster reconciliation by establishing the truth and ending a
culture of impunity?

In The Times last week, Linda Melvern wrote about `a large room in the
French Embassy in Kigali filled floor to ceiling with shredded documents.
This was probably the paper trail that might have revealed the depth of
involvement between the Elysée Palace and the Hutu faction responsible for
massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and opposition Hutu' (10). Holding
on to the moral parable of Rwanda and endorsing Kigali's invective against
France may work for now. But facts - about the start of the war, the actions
of the RPF, and the role of Western intervention more broadly in pushing
Rwanda to the brink - are stubborn things…

Barrie Collins is a writer on African affairs and author of Obedience in
Rwanda: A Critical Question published by Sheffield Hallam University Press
in 1998.

-----

References:

(1) `French Policy in Rwanda', A Callamard included in The Path of a
Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke,
Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 178, note 19

(2) Interview with Carla Del Ponte, Aktuelt, 17 April 2000. Cited in Le
drama rwandais : Les aveaux accablants des chefs de la Mission des Nations
Unies pour l'Assistance au Rwanda, E Karemera, Editions Sources du Nil, 2006

(3) Bush and Other War Criminals Meet in Rwanda: The Great 'Rwanda
Genocide'' Coverup [1] , P Erlinder, Global Research, 20 February 2008

(4) April 6th 1994 Attack Fits ICTR Mandate - Goldstone [2] , Hirondelle
News Agency, accessed 12 December 2006

(5) Rwanda's Genocide: The Politics of International Justice, K Moghalu,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 p.52

(6) Second Thoughts on the Hotel Rwanda [3] , Philpot, R, Race and History,
26 February 2005

(7) `Major General Paul Kagame behind the shooting down of late
Habyarimana's plane: an eye witness testimony [4] , 2nd Lt. Aloys Ruyenzi
Press release, 18 January 2005 (Ruyenzi re-affirmed his statement to the
author in an interview in Paris)

(8) `French Policy in Rwanda', A Callamard included in The Path of a
Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke,
Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p.163

(9) Open letter to Prime Minister Harper: Regarding state visit of current
President of Rwanda, P Erlinder, 6 April 2006 (Copy passed on to author by
Erlinder. Emphasis in the original)

(10) The murky truth about France and genocide [5] , L Melvern, The Times, 8
August 2008


[1]  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8137
[2]  http://allafrica.com/stories/200612140658.html
[3]  http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/2005/2602.html
[4]  http://www.inshuti.org/ruyenzi2.htm
[5]  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4481353.ece